Janet Hua Jiang

Senior Analyst

Janet Jiang is a Senior Analyst in the Research Team in the Funds Management and Banking Department. Her current research interests include optimal loss-sharing rules for the large value payment system, the effect of new means of payment on central bank policies, and experimental studies of bank runs, asset bubbles, multiple currencies and competing means of payment. She has also conducted research on how inflation affects banking crises and trading patterns. Janet obtained her PhD in Economics from Simon Fraser University.

We investigate competition between two intrinsically worthless currencies as a result of decentralized interactions between human subjects. We design a laboratory experiment based on a simple two-country, two-currency search model to study factors that affect circulation patterns and equilibrium selection.

We model the introduction of a new payment method, e.g., e-money, that competes with an existing payment method, e.g., cash. The new payment method involves relatively lower per-transaction costs for both buyers and sellers, but sellers must pay a fixed fee to accept the new payment method.

We develop a model to explain a puzzling trend in cash demand in recent years: the value of bank notes in circulation as a percentage of GDP has remained stable despite decreasing cash usage at points of sale owing to competition from alternative means of payment such as credit cards.

A "sunspot" is a variable that has no direct impact on the economy’s fundamental condition, such as preferences, endowments or technologies, but may nonetheless affect economic outcomes through the expectations channel as a coordination device. This paper investigates how people react to sunspots in the context of a bank-run game in a controlled laboratory environment.